Policy - CSM Internal

The first CSM has been a success in many ways, but it has also been plagued with a large number of problems with how things are done, and if I am elected I will make a priority of identifying and fixing as many of these problems as possible. Here are the primary issues with the CSM's internal mechanics that I see at present.

One of the saddest things about watching how the previous CSM has done business over the last four months has been seeing how badly the Council itself was run. There have been long, protracted fights over the nature of the Chairman's powers, whether or not members have the right to abstain from a vote, and several other similar minor procedural matters of no importance to anybody.

The reason for this is simple - the last Council never specified rules of order of any sort, and as such any time a debate over how to conduct business came up, they had no way to decide except internal wrangling. The results of this are as obvious as they are inevitable - gridlock on procedural matters, with the only way to break it being to shout the loudest. This was bad for one term of office, but it would be worse if it were to continue for a second.

As such, I pledge to bring up a vote to establish rules of order for future use at the first meeting of the new CSM. My preference is for Robert's Rules of Order, since they are both widely used and freely available, and I have a great deal of past experience with them, but I will accept any rules that the rest of the Council feels comfortable with so long as they are comprehensive and usable.

Almost as fundamental as rules of order is the issue of how meetings are conducted. At present, the requirement to make meetings happen in a chat channel is causing an immense amount of scheduling problems, and that is with the CSM being made up of seven Europeans and two Americans, with a total time zone spread of only seven hours. The difficulties Omber Zombie has had making meetings are unfortunate, but he was only an alternate this time - how ugly would scheduling be if he, or another person in Australia or east Asia, were a full member whose schedule had to be accommodated? This is a game played worldwide, and the problem of scheduling meetings is not a trivial one under those circumstances.

Between this and the issues of meetings getting longer and members having to leave midway through them, a new process for conducting CSM meeting should be looked into. Specifically, I will look into the possibility of moving CSM votes away from chat channels and towards a forum-based system. These forums will be publicly accessible, although the actual voting threads will be limited to CSM members and alternates, to allow for uninterrupted debate to take place. I am aware that the current structure of the official Eve forums cannot accommodate this at present, unfortunately, and thus one of two alternative methods for doing this will have to be looked at. My understanding is that CCP is working on the long-overdue overhaul to the forums, and if this is the case then I would like to work with CCP to ensure that the new forum software has the ability to do what we would like it to for this purpose. Failing that, however, the option of using off-site forums for this task will be implemented.

Another point of contention in the past has been the method of selecting the Chair. The rules specify that the person receiving the most votes in the election is Chair, but the election measures who would make the best representative, not who would make the best person to run meetings. As such, I will encourage whoever finishes first in the election to step aside as Chair as soon as possible, and hold a vote inside the CSM on who will be the new Chair. If I am elected Chair, I will resign immediately following the vote on rules of order and hold an election to fill the role.

It should be easier in future for players unfamiliar with the CSM and its processes to get at what they want to know, without having to sort through the chaos of the forums. As such, I will work to establish new threads of reference materials for stickying on the Assembly Hall and Jita Park Speakers Corner. I have already made one thread in this vein - an archive of past CSM submissions - and I will work with the rest of the CSM to figure out what a handful of other useful threads would be for reference, to allow players to quickly find what they want to know without flooding the boards with stickies of dubious utility. My inclinations are to a thread on JPSC linking meeting agendas, a thread on JPSC linking the items approved for submission in the next submission to CCP, and a thread on AH linking all topics to be discussed at the upcoming meeting, as well as the one I have already posted. This is subject to discussions with the rest of the CSM and CCP's approval, however.

There have been problems over the past term with issues being raised multiple times after they were rejected the first time. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is important to ensure that it is not used to flood meetings with proposals the Council will not pass merely because one member feels strongly about it. As such, I will propose a rule that no topic may be brought back to the Council after being rejected unless it is raised by a member who voted against it previously. If no new member is supporting it then it cannot pass, and as such the Council should not waste its time with it.

Finally, it should be ensured that players have access to all the discussions of the CSM, and that they are all easy to find. This should ultimately be done by CCP on the official site, but it hasn't been thus far, and I will work to find the problem that has stopped the chatlogs and minutes from being posted on the official site and fix it.

The role of providing resources to players can also be fulfilled by third-party means, and this was well done for the first month by Serenity Steele with his www.eve-csm.com site, but that site's abandonment has left the CSM with no third-party site to host meeting minutes on, leaving us with the stopgap measure of Jade Constantine using his corporate forums as a de facto CSM site. While this is certainly better than nothing, and his willingness to do this is appreciated, it is not how things should be operating, and it should be fixed as soon as possible. I will ensure that an effective, stable third-party site for the CSM exists for player reference.

I believe that with the above changes, the CSM will function much more effectively, and spend less time fighting over procedure and more time representing the players to CCP, which is the function that this body ultimately exists for.